Health, Mental Health, Psychology
Norman Wright responds to reader, Maggie O’Brien’s, article on grief, which you can read here.
It’s the emotional suffering you feel when something or someone you love is taken away. You may associate grief with the death of a loved one – and this type of loss does often cause the most intense grief. But any loss can cause grief, including:
The more significant the loss, the more intense the grief will be. However, even subtle losses can lead to grief. For example, you might experience grief after moving away from home, graduating from college, changing jobs, selling your family home, or retiring from a career you loved.
Grieving is a personal and highly individual experience. How you grieve depends on many factors, including your personality and coping style, your life experience, your faith, and the nature of the loss. The grieving process takes time. Healing happens gradually, so cannot be forced or hurried – and there is no fixed timeline for grieving. For some people, they start to feel better in weeks or months. For others, the grieving process can be prolonged over many years. Whatever your grief experience, it’s important to be patient and gentle with yourself, embrace and accept what you are feeling, do not pretend you are not feeling and thinking about your loss and allow the process to naturally unfold.
These stages of grief were based on her studies of the feelings of patients facing terminal illness, but many people have generalized them to other types of negative life changes and losses, such as the death of a loved one or a break-up.
The five stages of grief:
If you are experiencing any of these emotions following a loss, it may help to know that your reaction is natural and that you’ll heal in time. However, not everyone who is grieving goes through all of these stages – and that’s okay. Contrary to popular belief, you do not have to go through each stage in order to heal. In fact, some people resolve their grief without going through any of these stages. And if you do go through these stages of grief, you probably won’t experience them in a neat, sequential order, so don’t worry about what you “should” be feeling or which stage you’re supposed to be in.
These stages are not a rigid framework that applies to everyone who is mourning and not meant to place complex, deep and painful emotions into neat packages. They are responses to loss that many people have, and there is not a typical response to loss, as every loss is unique. Our grieving is as individual as our lives.”
Grief is a roller coaster, not a series of stages
How to manage your grief, loss and the pain
How you (might) cope with Loss –emotionally, relationally, psychologically, behaviourally and physically
We mourn for the losses experienced, develop a fear of further losses, and often find it a challenge to invest in events/people/relationships/ routines etc. that are similar or gave rise to the initial loss.
In all forms of human relating, we are looking for understanding and appreciation. Not criticism, judgement or made to feel inadequate for yearning or missing someone who meant a great deal to us. It is not just about missing the person; it is their presence and your experience of them that you will be missing. The memories that you have of the events you shared will be part of forever, and will go on to impact (hopefully in a positive way) into your future. Your father provided safety, support, consistency, stability and order to your existence for a long time. Not everyone you/we know is comfortable with nor are we as a nation encouraged to ‘be real’ with and ‘tune in’ to each other at the best of times, let alone when there are challenging experiences genuine regarding the others and their pain.
Despite this, it will be important to find opportunities for, and sensitised people who won’t judge or show you sympathy. In these places or with these people, they need to be prepared to listen/hear (with their hearts alongside their ears) show UPR (unconditional positive regard) for you, your feelings and your experience, is essential. Before any of this, embrace and accept that you miss both your parents and you feel their loss deeply. Express the feelings you have in a healthy and safe way and place. For many, being able to cry and talk is enough (if you feel listened to and not judged for feeling fragile). Others need the gym, scream at the moon, or write poetry to discharge the deep feeling that sometimes overwhelms out of the blue.
Norman Wright MSc, Dip Sup, Dip SW Clinical Psychotherapist is the Founder of The Wright Initiative
